A blog by the Swede Jakob Pettersson, dedicated to analyzing hierarchy, accountability, social anthropology, libertarian socialism, civil liberties, elevating mutuality and reciprocity in all of society, feminism, and stripping emperors of imaginary garment.
Published at the The Academic Activist, doing translations for c4ss.org. Twitter: @sushi_goat. Unless otherwise stated, the thought, opinions and prose on this website belongs to me.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Sometimes, it's what the government doesn't do which constitute its evil.

A lot of time, anti-statism is focused merely on its interference with the freedoms and direct violations with human rights. This is of course nothing illogical, there's no doubt a huge chunk of the evils of the state - its police force, it's military, it's prisons, its unjust legal system, it's land-grabbing, it's constant transformation of complex, voluntary human interaction into arbitrary simplified, taxable and/or profitable units - are mostly in its actions, i.e the evil in the state is in what it DOES. However, a lot of the time, it is what it DOESN'T do, it's in-actions, which constitutes it's evil. Though a lot of the present day evils of the bourgeois states inaction can more often than not be traced back to a past, historical action, one can't always change the historical injustices done through a state without the state itself playing a role, as it sometimes is too heavily involved in a certain injustice to completely bypass it.

Take the tax system: while ultimately, every anarchist (and even some Marxists, in the long run) is opposed to taxes, at least in their present form, but in the context of a nation state, who and who is not taxed plays an enormous amount of difference, and currently, the rich ARE paying way to little in taxes. The wealth that the rich holds is largely due to structural monopoly and subsidies designed and enforced by the state, and as long as they exist, it is only fair that they, the only people who benefit from government in a REAL sense, they should be paying a LOT in taxes, compared to the worker and unemployed, who only benefit from the government in the sense that it is more profitable to have people not starve to death, because it is well known that living people have stronger consuming power. In the end of the day, an anarchist wouldn't want to tax the rich, because radical leftists in general don't want to have many rich people, but contextually, it is a given that the state being inactive in collecting taxes from the people who owe the most to the taxpaying population is an evil.

Another way the state hurts people through inaction is by not protecting their rights and persons. It is curious how the U.S protects a hateful organization which continually promote ideas that reinforce abuse of minorities, but didn't do the same for Occupy? How about the police in India, who refused to protect striking Suzuki workers from the hired bouncers of the company? The police in Greece, who turns a blind eye to the abuses carried out by Golden Dawn?

The states inaction in these regards is proof of its complete lack of democratic control. The modern nation state, and the global and transnational institutions, refuse to act when the people they should be answering to command them to. The denial of popular control over the means of communication and decision-making is one of the core evils of the state.